J. D. Vance is the vice president of the United States of America, and in that position, he is president of the United States Senate. He is the highest-ranking Roman Catholic member of the executive branch. He has a law degree from one of the best law schools in the country. He’s a Marine Corps veteran, a former venture capitalist, and a former senator from Ohio. And he’s the author of a much-discussed memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, which was made into a movie. J. D. Vance is, by any sane measure, one of the elites in this country.

I am a Roman Catholic. I’m a professor at a Catholic university who teaches and studies the history of Catholic theology and its interaction with politics and literature. J. D. Vance and I have some mutual acquaintances. I was hoping to find something in his latest book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, to think about, to argue with, to learn from. But Vance has committed the worst sin for a writer: he’s written a boring book. Because I’m not a priest, I can’t offer any absolution. I can, however, offer some explanation.

Though the title has been billed as a spiritual memoir, the book barely attempts to be one. Just twenty-four of its 288 pages deal specifically with his conversion to Roman Catholicism. The rest of the book oscillates between Vance complaining about “the elites” and offering half-baked policy ideas that show no real engagement with the Roman Catholic social teaching that he says he so admires.